Back Up, or Lose Out!

| by Paula Brett |

Do you keep coming across the odd article or forum post about backing up your work? Or the horror story about someone who lost all their computer files, or webfiles etc.?

I have to say, it brings me out in a cold sweat to think of losing my website files, or all the files on my computer – what a hellish nightmare that scenario would be.

I finally did something about it last year, after much “yeah, OK, I’ll sort that out tomorrow” and I paid a small fee to Carbonite for a backup system. I’ve never actually had cause to use it, thank Goodness, until a couple of weeks ago.

I went to find a piece of software that I’d filed away in my little yellow `software’ folder on my desktop. Was it there, Nooooooooooo! It had disappeared. Had I deleted it? A quick rush to my Recycle Bin and some frantic clicking turned up absolutely zilch. I must’ve deleted the folder by mistake and then deleted the contents of my trash bin because it was nowhere to be found. Panic!

Then I remembered my Carbonite. Click the icon > click on Restore Files, and up popped all the files on my computer, including deleted ones – Phew!

Boy, was I glad that I got THAT important folder back. So don’t put it off, if you have been – get some kind of backup sorted out TODAY, before you regret not doing it.

I suffered a further scare a couple of days ago also (all these scares are not good for my heart, are they?) when I realised that my autoresponder service AWeber was down. This coincided with a lot of strange things happening on the net that day, including the Warrior Forum being hacked and other websites disappearing, appearing, slowing down, only half showing etc. My biz partner, Dan Thompson, who’s a bit of a techy Geek, explained it thus to our D9 Hosting clients:

There is 15-25% packet loss to those users that are coming in on the Level3 Communications network. That’s why pages are loading slowly for clients whose connections are coming through Level3 communications.

Level3 Communications is a carrier in proxy between the datacentre and your ISP’s, meaning it is not an issue of the datacenter, and not your ISP’s so there is little we can do about it right now except wait for Level3 to address the packet loss.

Ay??!! Quite!! (nods sagely at Dan in total understanding) WHOOOOSH – something just flew way over my head!

Back to Aweber and me panicking, again… what if Aweber went down one day and I lost all my AR sequences, emails and, horror of horrors my subscriber lists? OK, many of you may say, that’s not very likely… but still… I’m not the kind of person that likes to leave things to trust, so I decided to do a back up of my Aweber `stuff’.

I was really surprised at how easy it was to do. So for those of you that are using Aweber, I’ve done a very quick tutorial below:-

1. Login into your Aweber account

2. On your home page, scroll to the bottom and look in the left-hand column, you will see the following:

3. Click on the link that says Backup and Export all Data

4. You will then see a page containing your lists with big red `Deactivate’ buttons beside them – scroll to the end of this page and you will see this

5. Click on backup your data

6. A pop up box will appear that will ask you where you would like email notification sent – fill this in and click the Export All button

7. You will receive an email from Aweber when you zip file of data is ready to download. When you receive this return to your home page

8. Click the Backup and Export All Data link again, (bottom left-hand column)

9. Scroll to the bottom again and click on the Backup your Data link

10. You will see another pop up appear with a link to download your zip file

The zip file will contain your subsribers as .csv files (one for each of your lists) and all your messages will be in html and .txt format.

You can access that download for 2 weeks and then you will need to request a new one, which will overwrite the previous one.

I hope this post has made you take decisive action, if you haven’t already done so

Until next time…

Paula Brett

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